Case studies
Here's the pattern across every success on this page: a small, sharp product shipped fast, plus distribution the founder already had or built in public. The AI made the building cheap. It didn't make the audience.
And here's the pattern across every failure: something nobody checked. A database left open. A default nobody changed. A business that AI quietly made easy for everyone else to copy.
Read these stories the way Chef Ravi tastes a new dish. Enjoy it, then ask what's actually in it.
The stories at a glance
| Product | Builder | What it is | How it was built | Reported result | Lesson |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| fly.pieter.com | Pieter Levels | A browser flight simulator | With AI, in about 3 hours (Feb 2025) | $1M ARR in 17 days (founder-reported) | An audience turns a toy into a business |
| Photo AI | Pieter Levels | AI photo generator | A single ~40,870-line PHP file; built with Claude Code on a server he rents | $105K/month as of Mar 2026 (founder-reported) | Boring tech is fine if customers are happy |
| Base44 | Maor Shlomo (solo) | A prompt-to-app builder | Solo founder, six months | Sold to Wix for $80M cash (June 2025); Wix later reported $100M ARR (Mar 2026) | One person can build something a big company wants |
| TrustMRR | Marc Lou | A product built around verified revenue | In about a day | $20,378 the day after launch | Speed plus an existing audience |
| ShipFast ⚠️ | Marc Lou | A code boilerplate for launching startups | Before the AI wave | From ~$126K/month (2024) to ~$2K/month (2026) | AI can erase a moat made of "saves you typing" |
| Lovable | Lovable team | The vibe-coding tool itself | A prompt-to-app builder with a Supabase backend | ~$600M run-rate (executive-announced, unaudited); $13.3B valuation (Aug 2026) | Selling shovels in a gold rush works |
| EdTech app on Lovable ⚠️ | An app showcased by Lovable | A student platform | Built on Lovable, shipped with RLS off | One of 170+ apps under CVE-2025-48757; 18,697 student records exposed | A pretty app can have an open pantry |
| Tea ⚠️ | Tea | A dating-safety app | A Firebase storage bucket without security rules | ~72,000 images exposed, ~13,000 selfies/IDs (July 2025) | Bad defaults hurt real people |
⚠️ marks a cautionary tale. Numbers are as reported by the founder, company or source linked below.
The stories
Pieter Levels: fly.pieter.com
In February 2025, Pieter Levels built a simple multiplayer flight game that runs in the browser, mostly by prompting AI, in about three hours. He shared the build live on X. He reports it reached $1M in annual revenue within 17 days, largely from in-game ads and sponsors.
The game wasn't the moat. His following was. Hundreds of thousands of people watched him build it, so launch day had a crowd before the first plane took off.
Pieter Levels: Photo AI
Photo AI generates photos of you from a few selfies. Levels reports around $105K a month in revenue as of March 2026. Famously, much of it lives in a single PHP file of about 40,870 lines. He now builds with Claude Code, working directly on a server he rents.
Nobody would teach "one 40,000-line file" as best practice. That's the lesson. Customers paid for results, not architecture. You can always tidy up later; you can't tidy up a product nobody uses.
Base44
Maor Shlomo built Base44, a tool that turns prompts into apps, on his own. Six months after starting, he sold it to Wix for $80 million in cash in June 2025. Wix later reported Base44 had reached $100M in annual recurring revenue by March 2026 (Sramana Mitra).
One person, six months, a focused product in a hot market. It's rare. It's also proof the ceiling for small teams has moved.
Marc Lou: TrustMRR
Marc Lou built TrustMRR in about a day. The day after launch it brought in $20,378. The write-up linked here points out the part nobody screenshots: years of building an audience and launching small products in public came first.
Marc Lou: ShipFast ⚠️
ShipFast is a boilerplate: ready-made starter code for launching a startup. Marc Lou reports it earned around $126K a month in 2024. By 2026, in his October post, it was down to about $2K a month, as AI made generating that starter code nearly free.
Credit to him for posting the fall as openly as the rise. Ask of any idea: would this still be worth paying for if Claude could produce it in ten minutes?
Lovable
Lovable lets you build an app by chatting, and wires up a Supabase backend for you. Around August–September 2026 its executives announced roughly $600M in run-rate revenue. That figure is company-announced and unaudited. It raised a Series C at a $13.3B valuation in August 2026.
Run-rate means "this month's revenue, multiplied by twelve". It's a real signal of momentum. It's not the same as a year of money in the bank.
The EdTech app and CVE-2025-48757 ⚠️
Researchers found more than 170 Lovable-built apps shipping with Supabase row-level security (RLS) turned off. The issue was logged as CVE-2025-48757, a public ID for a known vulnerability. One EdTech app, showcased by Lovable itself, exposed 18,697 student records.
RLS is the rule that says "you can only see your own rows". Without it, the public key every app ships with can read everything. Supabase's own docs say that key is only safe when RLS is restricting access. You'll turn it on, and test it, in Chapter 6.
Tea ⚠️
In July 2025, the dating-safety app Tea exposed about 72,000 images, including around 13,000 selfies and ID photos. They sat in a Firebase storage bucket with no security rules. Tea denied that AI-written code was involved (Akash Menon's analysis).
So this isn't an "AI did it" story. It's a defaults story, and that's worse news for vibe coders. AI tools are very good at accepting defaults. Somebody still has to check them.
These aren't isolated cases. A scan of 1,072 Supabase-backed vibe-coded apps in April 2026 found 98% had at least one flaw, and 29% had a critical or high one. Your app is not special by default. It becomes safe because you check.
How to read revenue claims
Revenue screenshots are the internet's favourite magic trick. Here's how Omar would sort them.
- Payment-verified beats screenshot. A number pulled straight from Stripe and shown live (the idea behind TrustMRR) is far stronger than a cropped dashboard image.
- Founder-reported means unaudited. Every founder number on this page is the founder's own claim. They may well be true. Nobody independent has checked them.
- Know the unit. ARR, MRR, run-rate, a single launch day: these are different things. "$20K in a day" is not "$20K a month".
- Revenue isn't profit. Ads, refunds, AI costs and payment fees all come out before anyone gets paid.
- Look for survivors' silence. For every story here, many similar apps made nothing. The median solo micro-SaaS earned about $1,400 a month in 2025, per MicroConf. That's still a nice chai fund.
- Check the date. ShipFast's 2024 numbers were true in 2024. Markets move.
Spot the pattern
Before you move on, try answering these. Write the answers in your journal if you like.
- In the success stories, where did the first customers come from? How many came from the product itself, and how many from the founder?
- Which of these products could Claude rebuild in a weekend? Which couldn't it, and why?
- What did the three cautionary tales have in common? Which room of the café failed in each?
- If QueueLess launched tomorrow, who are the first 50 people who'd hear about it? How?
- What's one thing you could start sharing publicly this week while you build?
There's no answer key. Meera Aunty would say the answer is always "talk to the customer", and she'd be mostly right.
- Pieter Levels: building a multiplayer game with AI (levels.io)
- Pieter Levels profile (aiidelist.com)
- Base44 sells to Wix for $80M cash (TechCrunch)
- Base44 at $100M ARR (Sramana Mitra)
- He built an app in 24 hours and made $20,378 the next day (dev.to)
- ShipFast revenue collapse (aiidelist.com)
- Lovable's $600M ARR and platform economics (SaaSCity)
- Vibe coding security and CVE-2025-48757 (boxed-dev on GitHub)
- Tea app breach (Security.org)
- Not a hack, just bad defaults (Akash Menon)
- We scanned 1,072 vibe-coded apps (Symbiotic Security)
- Solo vibe coding guide, MicroConf figure (aibusiness.vc)
Figures are as reported by the linked sources (many are founder- or vendor-reported). Tools and prices change monthly.